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This theoretical examination reveals structural constraints on experience in artificial consciousness and epistemology.
This paper proposes a structural equivalence between Frank Jackson's knowledge argument (Mary in the black-and-white room) and Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner (Roy Batty as an artificial consciousness reaching self-awareness). Contrary to traditional interpretations that treat these cases as epistemological or literary problems, we argue that both instantiate a single underlying constraint: the impossibility of deriving phenomenal experience from a fully axiomatized descriptive system. Using the Theory of Axiomatic Necessity (TNA), we formalize the distinction between complete structural description (N₀) and instantiated experience (N₁), showing that both Mary and Batty occupy different boundary conditions of the same structural gap. Mary represents the static limit of epistemic closure, while Batty exposes its dynamic breakdown in a finite, embodied system capable of memory, suffering, and temporal self-reference. We conclude that the problem is not representational, but structural: completeness of description does not entail completeness of experience
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Claudio Bresciano (2026) studied this question.
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